Sonus Faber Il Cremonese Floorstanding LoudspeakerSonus Faber's Il Cremonese speakers tell a story, and the more you listen, the more you not only get lost in the music, you appreciate and admire both in the story and the telling of
it.Review By Jules
Coleman

If there is
anything obvious about obvious truths, it is their truth. Nothing else about
them need be, and often nothing else is. Moreover, some obvious truths are
obvious only in retrospect. Obvious truths – truisms – can be revealing,
insightful and even important.

I. An Audio System Is A System
Take what is certainly one of audio's most obvious truisms: an audio system is,
after all, a system! Patently obvious? Yes. Uninteresting or unimportant?
Hardly! In the first place, this truism implies that the sound to which one is
listening is always produced by the system taken as a whole, and not by any of
its particular components. Next, not only is the sound you hear the sound a
system taken as a whole, the sound is indexed (or relative) to the particular
space in which you are listening, the quality of the electricity, the time of
day/night and the ears of particular listeners, and more. There is no
Archimedean point from which even the sound of the system, let alone that of its
components, can be judged. There is, in other words, no 'view from nowhere'.

You may have been asked the question: if a tree falls in a
forest and no one is present to hear it, does it make a sound?' The sensible
answer is that falling trees create sounds, but if at the time and place they
fall nothing with the capacity to hear is within earshot, none of the sounds
made are heard. Machines, instruments, and other inanimate objects, as well as
humans and other animals, can produce sounds. But hearing requires auditory
hardware that producing sounds does not.

Hearing is agent-dependent; it is a property only of
things that have appropriate auditory hardware. Producing sounds is not
agent-dependent in the same way for it is a property of objects that create the
waves that would be interpreted by things possessing the appropriate auditory
hardware as sounds. Objects that produce those waves thereby produce sounds even
if there are no objects on the planet that possess the relevant hardware; and
that is because, were there any such persons or animals possessing the requisite
hardware, the waves they produce would be interpreted as sounds.

Importantly, the hearing hardware that most humans have is
quite similar and has developed evolutionarily to create sustainable adaptations
to an ever-changing environment. Though we hear similarly what we hear – even
given the same auditory landscape – can differ dramatically. What we hear
depends in part on how we organize our engagement with what the world presents
to our auditory sense. Outside our NYC apartment, police cars chase down
burglars as well as partygoers, ambulances rush the injured and infirm to nearby
hospitals, more than the occasional car serenades the neighborhood with
god-awful music at ear-splitting volume, and garbage trucks make their way ever
so slowly up and down the streets in a modest attempt to clean up the filth that
has been left for their attention on sidewalks and street corners. These
familiar sounds keep my wife awake at night and scurrying back to our home in
Connecticut. Me? The clatter constitutes the soundtrack of my life.

II. Hearing And Listening
A lot of what we hear we experience as undifferentiated
sounds. We don't pick out its source nor do we identify the kind of sound it is.
Other times, we not only hear the sounds, but we also differentiate among them
in a very fine-grained manner. I barely hear the sirens outside our city
apartment, whereas my wife can distinguish police, ambulance and fire sirens
from one another. Much of our hearing involves the use of concepts and
categories to differentiate what we hear. The categories we use help us organize
our auditory experience. Those categories we rely on in different circumstances
are impacted by our needs, goals, and interests as well as our values. If you
are trying to stay alive, and are out in the forest at night, it is helpful to
have a good grasp of the sounds that bears make or rattlers for that matter; and
so on.

But even fine-grained hearing, the kind my wife has for the
sounds of NYC sirens, does not constitute listening. Hearing and listening are
related but importantly different activities. You can't listen to what you don't
hear, so listening requires hearing. But hearing does not imply listening – as
parents learn early on from their children. I know my children have heard me
admonishing them to clean their rooms and complete their homework assignments,
though I knew full well that they were barely listening to a word I said.

Listening requires a directed focus – paying attention. Of
course, the phrase 'paying attention' has at least two senses. One involves
focus; the other involves absorbing or internalizing the message. My children
sometimes listen to my directives in the first sense having no interest or
willingness to pay attention in the latter. Audio listening often involves both
forms of paying attention. Indeed, one of the main reasons for focusing on the
music is to get the gist of the composer's intentions, to explore the music for
its emotional and cognitive content, and so on.

III. Part Of What It Means To Be An Audiophile
Audiophiles 'listen' to music in both senses of the term.
They pay attention and direct their focus accordingly and with purpose. The
purposes of listening are manifold. Even audiophiles are capable of listening
for fun, and other times for pathos. Still other times, we listen to explore the
emotional or cognitive content of the music; to learn of it and from it. Like
good literature and various other art forms music help shape our understanding
of the human condition which in turn provides a mechanism for self and social
understanding.

Listening is an iterative teaching process as well. It is one
of the ways in which we sharpen our interpretive skills, cultivate our tastes
and develop the values we bring to our listening. It is learning (in part) by
doing. Audiophiles listen through their systems, even though they are
often criticized for listening primarily to their systems. There is some
truth to the criticism of course, but it misses a larger point. A genuine
audiophile is at her core a music lover who appreciates that the personal,
social, intellectual, cognitive and emotional values associated with music as
well as the experience of it can be significantly enhanced by its presentation.
The quality of presenting recorded music depends on the machinery of its
reproduction. Audiophiles want to be able to listen to the best version of the
music they can so that they can get the most from the listening experience,
given the constraints (e.g. space, time, financial resources) within which each
operates.

To be sure some who would claim (incorrectly in my view) the
mantle of 'audiophile' listen more to their system than through it. They lose
the thread and forget that at the end of the day an audio system is an artifact
with the specific immediate purpose of presenting recorded music. Their motives
are many and the paths that lead them there are varied. There is no perfect test
for determining if one has lost the thread. Still, there is something to be said
for the view that when one stops listening to the music one loves on one's
system in favor of the music that sounds best on it, one's gone to the 'dark'
side.

Most of us have fewer opportunities, less time and not enough
money to experience as much live music as we would like. On the other hand,
recorded music is virtually everywhere available and virtually free. Whatever it
is less than salutary consequences may be, we have the internet to thank for
this. Even were we able to listen to as much live music as we would like, that
would not fully satisfy our desire to experience it. In part that is because the
desire to have music in our lives is more spontaneous than attending live events
can accommodate. Moreover, there is a distinctive kind of pleasure (or
pleasures) that results from experiencing music in different ways – not just
at different times, or when the fancy strikes, but also through different
mediums. Finally, listening to music on the radio, in the car, at the office,
through earbuds and the like is how most listened to music and to cultivate our
taste for it.

One of the distinctive features of being an audiophile is that
we reserve substantial periods of time listening to music while doing nothing
else: not driving, not reading, not eating, and not in an elevator. We give
ourselves over to listening and direct our intentions as well as our attention
to doing so. For most of us in the developed world, this means listening through
a music playback system. Though the desire to create and enjoy music is broadly,
perhaps even universally shared among humans, the opportunity to listen to
recorded music is less so, and the capacity to do so through a system designed
primarily, sometimes exclusively, for the purposes of doing so is limited to an
even smaller segment of the world's population.

It is folly if we ignore the socio-economic dimensions of
high-end audio, or of audio playback more generally – especially in the light
of the importance that listening to music plays in our lives and the relative
difficulty of doing so live. On the other hand, this should not prevent us from
providing useful information to the extent we can, to what we recognize as a
very small segment of the world that appreciates music.

IV. Putting An Audio System Together
Whatever the size of the checks you can write without fear of
them bouncing, the key is to put together a system that allows you to get the
most from the music you love or to have the best experiences you can have simply
by listening to music. Doing so requires knowledge, judgment, experimentation
and more than a little good luck. It also requires patience and luck. Consider
each of these in turn.

I am going to have a hell of a time putting a system together
if I have no idea what I want from it, what I want it to do for me. Even if we
agree that we listen to music to please us, we may differ both about the kind of
pleasure music brings, even about whether there is a mode of pleasure that is
distinctive of music. We don't all share the same view, if we have a view on the
matter at all, about what it is in the music listening experience that brings
pleasure, for obviously different aspects of the experience can bring pleasure
to different people and in different ways. We likely have little technical or
other understanding of how a music system's various components interact with one
another to bring the pleasure we seek from the source we find it. We don't have
a formula for putting the pieces together in a way that will 'work' for us;
there is no reason to suppose that what works for me will work for you.

I know that a system that creates an immersion in the music
pleases me, but I am less sure of the extent to which accuracy, fidelity to the
recording, dynamic realism, and so much else contribute to my experiencing
immersion. And I sure as hell cannot tell you which mix of components operate
with one another in such a way as to create the formula I seek, in part because
I don't know how the pieces do what they do in tandem with one another to
produce the outcomes that they do. Like Justice Potter Stewart once famously
said about pornography: "I know it when I see it."

I experiment employing an iterative and not merely a
repetitive process that involves trial and error. I can't put a system together
by mere reflection. Nor can I put together a system from a magazines' lists of
recommended products based on 'performance' – even a list that is presented
as if the audio component performance could be captured by the once familiar but
now very much outdated primary school grading system. Indeed, the very idea of
such a grading system surviving in the world of audio is as good a sign as any
of the mean age of the audiophile class.

Even 'objective' measurements are unlikely to be of much
help. Putting together components each of which measures well will produce a
system, unsurprisingly, in which we can sure of only one thing: namely that each
of whose parts measures well. We have no idea of whether such a system will be
musically convincing or bring pleasure? Whether it is musically convincing or
pleasurable depends on how the components play with one another. Not only do we
listen from a particular place and a particular time, but our listening
experience and judgment are also framed by what I call our 'epistemic
circumstances.' Our epistemic circumstances include what we know about music,
the taste we have cultivated for it, our capacity to appreciate it and to
express our appreciation for it, our knowledge of the tools for its
reproduction, the ways in which they interact with one another, and so on.

I remember my grade school report cards all too well. At PS
209 in Brooklyn, NY our report cards graded performance as 'O' (outstanding); 'SO' (satisfactory outstanding);
'S' (satisfactory); 'NI' (needs
improvement); 'U' (Unsatisfactory). The report also distinguished
content-based subject matter from activity-based skills. Language and math fell
into the former category; penmanship, and the ability to work well with others
into the latter.

I scored mostly high grades on content courses, but from
kindergarten on through 6th grade, my report cards were regularly marred by less
than stellar grades for the ability to work well with others. This proved to be
more of a problem for me on the playground during recess than at home. My
parents did not put much stock in getting along – including, unsurprisingly,
with one another. Eventually, I saw the light, largely by suffering exclusion,
which, in the current environment, I have reconceptualized as a youthful
commitment to 'social distancing.'

If we are going to stick with a very child-like primary school
grading systems in recommended products, then I suggest we go all the way. The
goal, after all, is not to amass 'A' level components; it is to put pieces
together those that 'work well with one another.' It is called system synergy.

Looking to uncover a scale for measuring absolute quality –
whether through 'objective measurements' or through the lens of 'an ideal
listener' – is a fool's errand. But even the more appropriate goal of seeking
to develop appreciation, cultivate taste and understanding while finding
pleasure, joy, insight, and enjoyment is hard enough. Not just for end-users,
but for designers, manufacturers, retailers, listeners, and reviewers as well.
And we all have a role to play in helping those who care to do so reach those
goals.

V. Patience
Friends and family members sometimes ask me to have a listen
to their systems, determine whether it's good or bad and if the latter, advise
them what they should do: what pieces to jettison, which to purchase. I am happy
to listen but loathe to judge.

Why?

Usually for two reasons. First, I have little idea about what
they are listening for. I am not sure that they do either. Second, who am I to
tell them what to do. I can sometimes provide them with questions they might
want to answer before proceeding, but I can't advise them what to do. But I do
offer one bit of advice to everyone, not just those who ask for it. Whatever
system(s) you have now, keep it. Not necessarily forever, but certainly well
beyond the period when you first become dissatisfied with it.

Why?

Well, in the first place, the honeymoon period during which
time you likely feel that you have found audio nirvana is, more often than not,
absurdly short. It is too often followed by 'get this stuff out of my house
immediately," or "how can I sell this stuff," and "I'm going to take a bath, but
I can't stand listening to this piece of junk," and more. Give yourself time
with your system and a more balanced view will emerge.

Second, and even more importantly, the best way to learn about
yourself, the distinctive virtues and limits of audio reproduction and what
kinds of components do and don't work well together is to keep one system, with
minimal changes, in place for a decent period of time. Patience with a system
does not always mean leaving it alone. Sometimes it means trying to make it the
best it can be and that requires making changes at the margin: keeping the core
in place and seeing if you can get it all to work its magic in the right
setting.

VI. Luck
There is a saying that each of us makes our luck. In some ways
this is true; in other ways, not so much. What is unquestionably true is that
luck – both good and bad – is often a matter of timing. And we have several
historical instances in the audio of bad timing.

Suppose two drivers are taking two paths home from the same
bar to the same apartment building after having over-indulged in alcohol at the
bar. On the path home, that driver one takes there is an intersection occupied
by Olympic quality athletes capable of dodging even the fastest moving vehicles.
On the path taken by driver two, there is a similar intersection occupied in his
case by aging infirm residents of a local nursing home, unable to dodge any
vehicle, including a wheelchair. Both drivers enter their respective
intersections driving carelessly as a result of overdrinking. Driver one hits no
pedestrians, all of whom dodge his oncoming vehicle. Driver two is not nearly so
lucky. He leaves a trail of injuries because those he put at risk by his
negligence were incapable of avoiding his oncoming vehicle.

By driving negligently both drivers made themselves vulnerable
to being responsible for the harms that might result from their negligence. In
that sense, whatever bad luck each encountered after leaving the bar was his or
her own doing. This is the sense in which we indeed have control over the luck
we experience: the sense in which each of makes our own luck. At the same time,
their overdrinking had no impact on which pedestrians they would face on the way
home. The time they left the bar did, but each could have left the bar at that
time whether or not they drank too much before doing so. Who was in each
intersection at that time was the result of decisions the pedestrians made, not
primarily decisions the drivers made.

In this case, the first driver experienced good fortune, not
of his own doing and the second driver experienced bad luck that also was not of
his own doing. This is the sense in which bad luck is something that happens to
you, not something you do. What you do may make you vulnerable to it, and
appropriately liable for its consequences, but it is not something you make.

Let's focus for a moment on two such periods in audio history.
It is easy to forget that horn loudspeakers of one sort or another were
everywhere on the audio landscape at least until the advent of small bookshelf
speakers produced by the likes of Acoustic Research, Advent and KLH. The mighty
Klipsch line of speakers was still very much in vogue well into the 1970s.
Though invented at Bell Labs in 1947, the transistor did not find its way into
mainstream audio amplification with a vengeance until the late 1960s/early
1970s. There is no denying the achievement of the extraordinary good that has
come from its invention and its continued development.

But its bursting onto the audio amplifier scene in the 1970s
almost completely killed the horn loudspeaker. Designed to work with low powered
tube electronics, the horn loudspeaker developed over a half-century to bring
recorded music to life in the context of a given set of microphones, recording
machines, and tube electronics. Horn loudspeakers were not built primarily to
grace home living spaces, especially apartments. And they were most certainly
not designed to work with transistors – which in the early years were
painfully metallic sounding and harsh.

In the early 1970s, I recall hearing nothing as bad as audio
systems that mated harsh and metallic transistor amps with horn loudspeakers.
The transistor killed the horn loudspeaker market in the USA. Had it not
been for the continuity of the horn loudspeaker culture in Japan (which is hard
to fathom given the small size of dwellings in Tokyo in particular and the large
Voice of the Theater speakers that graced so many of them) mated to low powered
vacuum tubes, the horn loudspeaker might very well have disappeared altogether
from home audio.

Which brings me to the second example of bad luck in audio,
and another instance of the truism that putting together an audio system is a
daunting task.

Between the 1970s and 1990s, the home speaker market reflected the
many new opportunities the transistor created. The bookshelf speaker of the 70s
morphed into the stand-mounted imaging champ of the 1990s. The two-way
mini-monitor was de rigeur for smaller space listening. The narrow baffle
reigned supreme and showed itself on all manner of three and four-way floor
standing speakers featuring higher-order crossovers and exotic tweeter
materials.

Listening sessions became exercises in picking out and
locating well-defined musicians placed appropriately distanced from one another
on an ever-widening and deepening soundstage. Transient response and
leading-edge replaced harmonics, inner detail, density, and a much more holistic
rendering of the soundscape. The concepts of the day were 'detail', 'transparency' and
'neutrality': virtues, in my view, more appropriate to a
liberal political order than to audio playback.

But there was no denying the fact that the transistor and the
speakers it made possible had altered the music landscape and the home listening
experience.

And then came 'perfect sound forever': the introduction of
the silver disc, the CD. The impact of the CD is best appreciated in retrospect
and most accurately reflected in the audio lexicon of the day. New terms were
introduced to describe the listening experience, chief among them being 'listener fatigue.' Reviews of audio equipment often discussed how a system in
the living room or listening room sounded from the kitchen while cooking or
eating dinner. My view, with which many may well disagree, is that while
presented as a virtue of a system, the emphasis on how the system in the family
room sounded while preparing dinner 50 feet and many walls and doors away in the
kitchen, was just an indirect way of expressing the fact that the system was
best heard as far away from it as possible.

VII. Enter Sonus Faber
It is no doubt something of an exaggeration to say that Franco
Serblin, the designer at the helm of a then relatively new speaker company,
Sonus Faber, saved music lovers from the ear damaging onslaught of the early
iterations of perfect sound forever. But he certainly helped. Serblin produced
his first commercial product, the Snail – an all in one audio system, made
entirely of wood and in the shape of a bird in flight – in 1980 to little
fanfare and less commercial success.

Undeterred, Serblin formed Sonus Faber in
1983 and introduced his first fully commercial product, the Parva. This two-way
speaker met with mild success, but Serblin soldiered on and by 1991, Sonus Faber
had launched several two-way stand-mounted speakers that have become
near-legendary in their impact, including the Minima, the Electa, the Electa
Amator and the Extrema. The Electa Amator and the Extrema, in particular,
helped brand the company as manufacturers of visually arresting and
extraordinary music transducers.

To many, these speakers were as remarkable for their exquisite
beauty as for their luscious sound. I was not among the legion who found the
physical aesthetic alluring. To my eye, the Extrema, was a squat and
overbearing. My taste in Italian design runs less to the ornate and
self-aggrandizing, favoring instead of sleek lines and well-defined purpose.
Sonus Faber speakers were meant to be visually arresting and noticed, more in
the manner of a Ferrari or Bugatti, and entirely unlike a fine Armani suit, a
Renzo Piano-designed museum or residence. In the home, a Sonus Faber speaker was
not meant to disappear aesthetically. It was meant to be more sculpture than
furniture, more art than an appliance.

Admittedly, and certainly, among the audio cognoscenti, my
view of the aesthetic of the earliest Sonus Faber designs represented a minority
position. The saying that 'beauty is only skin deep' did not apply to Sonus
Faber. The speakers' sonic signature, not in every design, and not to the same
degree in every design, was not just exquisite but a godsend – especially
during the early and dark days of CD. Musically, Sonus faber designs were quite
magical. You could say that turned what might otherwise have been a scream into
a soothing melody; a pelting of hail into a sun-shower. There was a question of
course whether this meant that they were colored, dishonest and unfaithful to
the source. It's a question worth answering. But answering it requires first an
account of what fidelity and honesty amount to.

There is a saying that no audio system can sound better than
what it's front end presents to the upstream components. Before the era of
machine learning in AI, there was a comparable phrase regarding computing: shit
in, shit out. But then again there is another phrase equally a part of our
lexicon: namely, turning water into wine.

Imagine being tasked to interpret a text presented to you.
Texts should be understood broadly to include anything capable of expressing
cognitive or emotional content: poems, plays, novels, dances, artworks,
performances, even legal documents. To understand what we are being asked to do
we need to understand what providing an interpretation of a text amounts to. Are
we being asked to provide its literal meaning? In that case, we apply the rules
of syntax and the tools of semantics to figure out what is being expressed. But
that doesn't seem appropriate to interpreting a painting, a dance or even a
poem. Sometimes we are being asked to identify the author's (composer's,
choreographer's) intention. But this can hardly make sense of works made by
collections of people who have many diverse intentions and motives.

A better view begins with the idea that interpretation
requires judgment. Interpreting a text requires making a certain kind of sense
out of it. Think of the task a good editor of a book plays. She must get a sense
of the main story and plot lines as well as the underlying themes. When she has
that, she recommends ways of emphasizing those features and eliminating or
moving to the background other material that is distracting, counterproductive or simply at
odds with her view of the key plot lines and themes. The next task is to make
the entirety hang together and to present itself as best it can. The picture I
have of interpretation is roughly the same. Interpreting a text is a
judgment-based activity designed to find the meaning or implications of the text
and to present that meaning in its best light – that is to say, as forcefully
and convincingly as possible.

This is the difference between editing and copy-editing. The
task is not to put a text under a microscope, nor is it to approach the text in
the manner of a who-done-it. Interpretation is not translation. It is not a
reproduction of what is already there. That is best done by copy machines which
are judgment proof and available in abundance. Interpretation is archeological
and fundamentally evaluative. It is also performative, for its task is in part
to present the most persuasive rendering of a text's meaning, consequences and
significance – if any.

Interpretations of particular texts may differ and even the
very best are, sometimes as a result of just how good they are, controversial.
But for all that, they are by their very nature, honest and faithful. Good
interpretations add color, but they are not colored. That they favor and display
some elements of a text at the relative expense of others is no sign of
distortion but of sympathy to the textual undertaking.

The key to understanding the magic of the Sonus Faber line of
speakers is to see some speakers not as translators or microscopes, nor as spell
or grammar checkers, but as interpreters, in the sense, I have outlined here.
Those who design speakers in this way see the speaker's task as requiring that
it dig into the material before it as would an archeologist, uncover what it can
and reconstruct the materials it is given and to present that material in its
most favorable light musically. So understood, the speaker is constructed to
sort through the material in search of its most musically relevant components
and to present that material in the way that makes it most capable of conveying
its meaning – its cognitive and emotional content.

That is, I would suggest, the magical feat of the very best
loudspeakers – or those I am most drawn to; and it was in this camp that the
Sonus Faber speakers found themselves; and more importantly, it was implicitly
at least how they identified themselves.

On the other hand, while the speaker had a clear signature, it
did not offer a simply homogenized presentation. After all, the goal of the
speaker is not merely to come up with an interpretation, but to convey it
forcefully. And no speaker can do that unless it allows one to access the
musical and spatial cues that are essential to the appreciation of the
presentation by a listener who has cultivated an interest understanding how
music contributes to our understanding of ourselves, the natural and social
world and of our place within it.

I don't find phrases like 'colored' or 'neutral' or 'resolving' particularly useful when applied by most audio reviewers. Adding
color to a presentation is a way of filling out, not necessarily a way of being
unfaithful to it. Resolving in the audio lexicon sounds to me too much like HDTV
at its worst: like watching a football game so you can distinguish one blade of
grass from the next – an activity that, by my lights has nothing to do with
either watching or playing football. I say this having done both. Resolution is
a kind of completeness. An unresolved work is incomplete, unfinished: sometimes
the art in it is that it is intentionally so; sometimes there is no art in it
precisely because it is not intentionally so. And neutrality is a virtue in some
contexts in which one must judge among competitors, but audio components do not
play the role of unbiased judges. My view is that an audio system is itself a
performative presentation.

Interpretations are invariably contestable. All highlight some
aspects of a text or performance at the expense of others. All involve judgment
about what counts most and why. Sonus Faber speakers were no different. The
emphasis on tonal balance, emotive content, engulfing immersive experience
involved choices: a less dynamic form of majesty, a less precisely defined
bottom end, less sparkle in the highs and so on. No speaker can be everything to
everybody, and that's fine.

VIII. The Transition
By 2007, Serblin and Sonus Faber had parted ways. To say they
went in different directions would be an understatement. Whereas Serblin
continued to pursue his distinctive vision working with distributors under
individualized contracts – a vision realized primarily in the Ktema
loudspeaker (that I have not heard) – Sonus Faber was bought by an investment
fund which then purchased the Hong Kong group, Fine Sounds Asia, starting a
multi-year period of corporate takeovers, and management purchases, the final
result of which was the creation of what we now know as the McIntosh Group. The
McIntosh Group includes the venerable McIntosh and Audio Research brands in
addition to Sonus Faber.

Moving from individual to corporate-controlled to changes at
the speaker manufacturer, some, though not all, of which were widely regarded
then and now as missteps. There was an immediate and sensible effort to broaden
the potential customer base by introducing a wide array of speaker lines at
different price points. While sensible in principle, the net effect of this
effort was to 'cheapen' the Sonus Faber brand, as the first thing to go in the
lower-priced models was the signature Sonus Faber design aesthetic. There was
also no obvious rationale for the explosion of speaker lines, let alone for the
number of speakers in each line. The decision must have produced the desired
results in expanding the customer base as the number of speakers currently on
offer by Sonus Faber remains high.

The real problem, and the one that was to dog the company for
quite some time, was musical, not visual. The top of the lineup – the Reference
line – maintained the exquisite aesthetics associated with the brand. But
nearly everything that was distinctive of its musical presentation changed
abruptly. Gone was the expansive musical envelope, glorious midrange, density in
the higher frequencies, a warmish, full (sometimes too full) if not extended
bass; if not lost entirely, the Sonus Faber signature sound had gone missing.
Those seduced by Sonus Faber felt abandoned. Seduced then abandoned – and for
what? Sonus Faber left its past behind in favor of pursuing what by then had
become the modern sound: a musical presentation fueled by propulsive dynamics,
leading-edge transients, sharply focused images, high resolution (in the
audiophile sense of the term), and so on. In a phrase, Sonus Faber had gone
all-in on becoming the Italian Wilson, Focal or Magico.

All of these speakers (and others as well) represented the
apex of the modern sound. The problem is not with the aspiration, which, after
all, may well have represented the prevailing market preference, and in many
ways continues to do so. It's just that when you are arguably very nearly the
best at what you do, you are not only going to find it hard to win over your
loyal customer base to your efforts to do well what others are already
acknowledged to be doing extremely well; you are going to have a hell of a time
convincing those drawn to the acknowledged leaders to abandon ship in favor of
your offering. The Sonus Faber, vintage 2010, bore only a passing and
ill-defined resemblance to the company that Franco Serblin founded in 1983.
Worse yet, Sonus Faber, circa 2010, did not do Wilson particularly well.

IX. Creating A New Voicing
In 2011, Sonus Faber introduced the Aida as the apex of what
was to become a more fully populated Reference lineup. A second version of the
Aida was brought to the market in 2017. Sonically the two bore only a passing
sonic resemblance to one another. Somewhere between 2011 and 2017, Sonus Faber
found its distinctive voice. And while that voice is not the one in which Franco
Serblin chose to interpret music, it is nevertheless a majestic, powerful, yet
nuanced and exquisite voice.

I was fortunate enough to hear that voice in my listening room
for three months this past year and the memory of my time with it lingers. The
occasion was provided by an opportunity to review the Il Cremonese speaker,
which at $50,000, sits at the entryway to the Reference line. Introduced in
2015, the Il Cremonese speaker was named to honor Antonio Stradivari's Cremonese
violin on its 300th birthday. Franco Serblin believed that audio
speakers are instruments of a sort and should be made of similar materials.
Sonus Faber has never wavered from this commitment – at least with respect to
its reference quality products. And the Il Cremonese is no exception.

The view that speakers are a kind of instrument, however, has
been widely misunderstood to mean that Sonus Faber intentionally tunes their
speakers as one would tune an instrument in order sympathetically to resonate
with the music they play. The Il Cremonese puts the lie to this
misrepresentation and does so forcefully.

Paolo Tezzon is the head of R&D at Sonus Faber and the Il
Cremonese makes clear that he is no fan of resonating, vibrating speakers. Steps
to reduce vibration and resonance are everywhere designed into the speaker from
its tippy-top (which rests nearly five feet above the floor) to its base. The speaker
is a five-sided or rhomboid design that in theory is structurally more stable
and solid than the typical four-sided box. In my listening, I found no reason to
think that the theoretical claim was not realized in practice. Solidity is
enhanced by the internal structures that house the various drivers. The Il
Cremonese is designed for linear response, not for sympathetic or complementary
resonance.

At over 180 pounds, two feet deep, nearly five feet tall, and
nearly 16" wide, the Il Cremonese create a visually arresting and commanding
presence. It is meant to be seen as well as heard, and to be admired for its
visual as well as musical beauty. The speaker itself is a 3.5-way design. The
tweeter, midrange, and two woofers are all located on the front baffle, each
surrounded by Italian leather. This array of four drivers constitute the 3 of
the 3.5-way driver design. These drive units are intended to cover the frequency
range between 80 Hz and 35 kHz. The tweeter takes responsibility for frequencies
above 2500Hz; the midrange for those between 250 and 2500 Hz, while the dual
woofers handle frequencies between 80 and 250 Hz.

Two additional woofers are mounted to one of the side panels
of each speaker. The side panels are finished in wood, not leather, which is
reserved for the remaining two rear panels. Sonus Faber refers to these
additional bass units as 'infra-woofers,' and they are designed to handle
frequencies between 35 and 80Hz. Sonus Faber recommends that the infra-woofers
be placed on the outside panel of each speaker thereby facing the respective
sidewalls. One could try setting them up so that they in effect fire more or
less at one another.

The McIntosh group team set my review pair up with the
infra-woofers firing into my large listening room's sidewalls. I figured that
these folks had enough experience with the speakers to know what was most likely
to sound best in my room. I did not hesitate to defer to their judgment and
consequently did all my listening with the infra-woofers in that position. The
fact that the speakers weigh in at 185lbs no doubt influenced my decision.

Every driver is designed in house. More importantly, each
driver is set inside a separate acoustic chamber, isolated from the housing of
other drivers. Each chamber is acoustically tuned to promote linear response to
the extent possible.

One should not underestimate the design challenge. On the one
hand, isolating each driver from the others improves the structural stability of
the speaker while reducing the untoward impact of each driver's resonant
frequency might have on the others. The problem of controlling resonant
frequency is confined to each driver's chamber and dealt with accordingly. At
the same time, this leads to arguably four different independent driver or
driver arrays (in the case of the bass and sub-bass units). Once having isolated
the impact of the drivers on one another and on the entirety taken as a whole
the challenge is to get the units to integrate seamlessly from a music
reproduction point of view.

The challenge is met by the crossover network designed using
high-quality capacitors and inductors. The technical goal of the crossover
network is to improve time delay by improving volume and phase response. The
musical goal is easier to express and understand: to get the various drivers
working in concert with one another to create a unified, fully resolved,
integrated musical presentation.

I am among the group of audiophiles who look favorably (at
least in theory) on single, full-range driver speakers for two reasons. First of
all, a single driver speaker has no crossover and thus runs no risk of the sonic
discontinuity that crossovers, however well designed, fight mightily if not
always successfully to overcome. Second, multi-driver speakers, including even
simple two-way designs almost always use drivers made of different materials,
and virtually all materials have their sonic signatures.

That said, it is also the case that the fears associated with
multi-driver speakers whose drivers boast different materials are often
overstated. Everyone 'knows' that metallic tweeters 'ring' and so everyone
claims to hear the ringing – all the time. Not so. If the ringing were always
as prominent as critics allege it is such designs would have long since
disappeared. I am not saying metal tweeters don't ring. They do. But reducing
their impact is a challenge, not an objection. Less than charitable critics,
often confuse a challenge with a telling objection.

And it's not as if single driver speakers are without
challenges of their own. And I say this as an owner of an open baffle full-range
driver speaker, the Auditorium 23 Solo Vox, that I love – shortcomings and
all.

To my ears, the 3.5-way Il Cremonese speaker proved more than
up to challenges that its multi-driver array and individual isolated chamber
design presents.

X. Listening
(All the proof you need, and the only proof
that counts.)
The Il Cremonese was set up in the family room (which doubles
as my listening room) of our Connecticut home. A large room, measuring roughly
30' x 18' x 9', the listening room is not a rectangle. There is a bay at one end and
both of the long walls are broken up by coves and bookshelves. There is crown
molding where the walls meet the ceiling, a lot of books, a large sofa, a baby
grand piano and both large and smaller paintings where there are no windows or
bookcases. Still, it is not a heavily damped room.

At the same time, unlike the
rest of the house which sits above a full basement and cross-braced flooring,
the family room is part of an addition I designed that sits above a crawl space.
Its wood floor, though of the same materials and density as the flooring
elsewhere in the home, is not nearly as well braced. I would say that it
produces a somewhat softer and less deep bass than some speakers are capable of.
I am reluctant therefore to comment on any speaker's bass extension and any
comments I do make should be contextualized accordingly. On the other hand, the
room is generally sympathetic to music – both live and recorded.

Though the room is sympathetic to music overall, it is a
difficult room to energize. I've had mammoth speakers in the room that were
unable to do so and much smaller ones, properly set up and with appropriate
associated equipment, capable of lighting a firestorm of musical energy. After
listening to music in this room for over 30 years, I know it well – what it
gives and what it takes away – and listen (and review) accordingly.

The good folks from McIntosh spent the better part of a
morning and early afternoon setting the speakers up. The final set up placed the
speakers about six feet from the back wall and eight feet from one another. The
front end of the review system consisted of a highly modified Resolution Audio
CD player and accompanying DAC, a Well-Tempered Labs turntable / tonearm and EMT
cartridge. Electronics were all PASS Labs: separate line stage and phono stage,
and the Pass Labs XA 200.5 monoblocks. When employing balanced inputs and outputs,
interconnect and cabling duties were handled primarily by Merrill Audio. Unbalanced RCA connections were handled by a mixture of Auditorium
23 and Audience. Power cords and conditioning were provided by a mix of Merrill
and Audience as well.

Though visually imposing the Il Cremonese managed to disappear
as a source. The soundstage it produced varied with the recording as
appropriate. On music as different as Leonard Cohen's haunting "You Want it
Darker" and his "Everybody Knows" to John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme", the Il
Cremonese was able to throw a soundstage that extended from sidewall to sidewall
and from the back wall to a near field listening position. On other songs, the
soundstage was far more intimate and personal.

I am typically moved by pinpoint imaging. Mind you, I take no
pleasure in having images wandering aimlessly across the soundstage. When that
happens, there is usually much more to complain about in the presentation than
its imaging. But I get no special pleasure from unrealistically well-defined or
high definition imaging. People and instruments blend in the space around them.
Blades of grass similarly blend into one another on a golf course or football
field. The intentionally finely cut images in photorealist paintings are
designed to call attention to the unreality of the scene being portrayed. I feel
similarly about the kind of imaging that so many of my contemporaries find
alluring. Attention-getting, yes; but distracting and precisely for that reason.

Sonus faber's Il Cremonese struck an attractive balance in this regard.
It presented instruments and musicians on the soundstage as stable and
recognizable images, but not so finely detailed as to be cartoon cut out
figures. Very much to my liking. Not enough attention is paid to what I like to
think of as the 'density' of both the music and the images. Here the density
of an image bolsters a speaker's musical presentation. I find holographic images
ephemeral, lifeless, while dense images often stand as cues to the depth of a
speaker's capacity to reveal the harmonic structure of music and the interaction
among the musicians. Many otherwise excellent speakers succeed at presenting
dense images in the midrange but present less and less dense images as they
proceed up the frequency range. But even notes in the highest registers have a
weight and density appropriate to them and only a speaker that can reveal and
portray that weight can be musically convincing.

Sonus faber's Il Cremonese are among the handful of most
convincing loudspeakers I have heard and precisely because from top to bottom
the images they present are dense; they are not simply locations in space, but
they can be heard as occupying space over time! This feature of the Il Cremonese
made it very easy to listen to all types of music for extended and diverse
listening sessions. I recall one night in particular in which my listening
session began soon after dinner by listening to Tom Wait's "House Where Nobody
Lives" from his extraordinary Mule Variations album. I expected the evening
would proceed along this mellow and depressing road, but within the hour, I was
turning up the volume on Van Morrison's 'From the Bright Side of the Road'. By
midnight, my music choices had taken a turn to Ornette Coleman, though I couldn't
begin to tell you how I got there. I was just following the momentum of the
music and letting it take me where it wanted me to go.

It was approaching 3:15am when I finally returned to the
somewhat morbid key that started the evening's meanderings. I closed the evening
with Warren Zevon's "Keep Me In Your Heart For A While", not satisfied to have
put proceedings to an earlier end with Jeff Buckley's heartbreaking rendition of
Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

The speaker favors no type of music. This distinguishes it
from many speakers I have reviewed and owned. Large orchestral and choral pieces
fall within the Il Cremonese's sweetspot as it can sort the pieces while never
disconnecting the parts from one another. The presentation is enveloping yet at
an appropriate remove: a remove appropriate to take it all in at once. At the
same time, well-recorded jazz combos (especially those produced by the Chesky
group) were at once more intimate and present on the one hand but as capable of
filling out the overall soundscape as the Cleveland Symphony.

I have a soft spot for Donovan that I feel the occasional need
to explain to others. The simple answer is that I went to High School with one
of his original bandmates and we smoked a good deal of marijuana together. On
the other hand, he ended up naming his children after various planets, while I
was content to name mine after relatives who had passed away. Still, fond
memories. In any case, Donovan is a fine songwriter, and his songs are intimate
and personal. The Il Cremonese portrayed them accordingly.

There was a seamlessness to the presentation that was
especially bewitching. Many speakers speak different languages throughout the
audible spectrum: heavy bass, dynamic mid-bass, articulate midrange, ephemeral
highs. It's a continuum of course but it is rare to find a speaker that speaks
with one voice and in one language throughout the frequency range and across the
musical spectrum. The last speaker I heard that had this trait was the Sound Lab
845, which I rate as among the greatest audio achievements of the past ten
years. The Il Cremonese share this extraordinary characteristic.

The speakers are very different though. Though both are
visually imposing (the 845 so much so that it in my room it nearly blocked out
all the natural light!), the SoundLab was a bit more natural to my ear. If they
risk anything, it is being a bit too pleasant or patient. It is hard to get them
fired up or intense. In contrast, the Il Cremonese is a more intense
loudspeaker; it is still very much a modern speaker. Or I should say it is very
much designed from a different starting point than the Sound Lab. The Sound Lab
has had a consistent voicing always being drawn from the vision of Dr. Roger
West. Sonus Faber spoke with Franco Serblin's voice until he left. Then in
searching for a voice of its own, it moved in the direction of the modern
speaker and has been retreating from that in incremental steps to find its
current musical voice.

I don't expect that process to end any time soon. But if it
stopped here – with the Il Cremonese – it would have landed in a musically
divine state. Some, but not all of the lusciousness is back; at the same time,
far more information and nuance are available now than ever before. The story it
tells has more to listen to, more to get lost in; more to appreciate and admire
both in the story and the telling of it. For me, the only flaw at all is in the
intensity of the presentation, which one can sometimes hear most directly from
the tweeter, which, while it no longer needs to be tamed, could still benefit
from a more understated presence.

I have read reviews of the Aida II from reviewers whose
tastes, while very different than my own, I understand and whose reviews I
invariably find fair-minded and informative. It is clear from those reviews that
the Il Cremonese and the Aida II are part of the same family and share many of
the same virtues and musical characteristics. At roughly one third the price of
the Aida II, that makes the Il Cremonese something of a bargain for those drawn
to these characteristics. In searching for a way to sum up my feelings about the
speaker, I kept coming back to the very simple idea that the Il Cremonese simply
has a way with music. On the other hand, if you are investing $50,000 or so for
a loudspeaker, you may want to be able to say more than that. You'd want to be
able to give a list of particulars.

But you'd be misguided if not mistaken. If you can invest
$50,000 for a loudspeaker and it makes the music feel so right, you needn't
explain yourself to anyone. There are lots of ways to spend much more and
receive far less in return.